Department News

May 9, 2019
Our PhD candidate, Pelin Kivrak has won a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center. It is a one-year postdoctoral fellowship in connection with the Center’s Andrew W. Mellon Foundation seminar on the topic of migration and the humanities. Migration plays as critical a role in the moral imagination of the humanities as it does in shaping the activist vision of humanitarianism and human rights. Too often, the humanities are summoned merely as witnesses to...
May 7, 2019
Moira Fradinger is awarded the Berlin Prize. She will spend Spring 2020 in Germany. The full story was published in the Yale News. Congratulations to you Professor Fradinger!
March 25, 2019
Join us for a discussion of Martin Hägglund’s new book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. Ranging from fundamental existential questions to the most pressing social issues of our time, This Life argues that our commitment to freedom and democracy should lead us beyond both religion and capitalism. Leading theorists of society, culture, literature and politics will offer comments on the book, the author will respond, and we’ll have plenty of time for the audience’s participation....
March 13, 2019
Fifth-year Ph.D. candidate Shaj Mathew has published an article on the Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan:  “Traveling Realisms, Shared Modernities, Eternal Moods: The Uses of Anton Chekhov in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep.” Adaptation (2019). 1-15.
March 11, 2019
Read Professor Martin Hägglund’s New York Times article ”Why Mortality Makes Us Free”:  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/opinion/why-mortality-makes-us-free.html
February 18, 2019
“Stern was initially inspired to write The Study of Animal Languages while in college, when she entered her professor’s office and noticed that, although no one was speaking, the lie detector he kept in jest on the cabinet across from his desk was lighting up. The machine was picking up the melody of an apparently dishonest bird outside the window. She was struck by our limited understanding of the meanings of these birdsongs—noises we tend to tune out as meaningless—and, by extension, our...
February 11, 2019
A profound, original, and accessible book that offers a new secular vision of how we can lead our lives. Ranging from fundamental existential questions to the most pressing social issues of our time, This Life shows why our commitment to freedom and democracy should lead us beyond both religion and capitalism. In this groundbreaking book, the philosopher Martin Hägglund challenges our received notions of faith and freedom. The faith we need to cultivate, he argues, is not a religious faith in...